The open verdict that helps the Met not a jot

Monday 15 December 2008 09:09 BST

The body of Jean Charles de Menezes after he was shot by police on the Northern line

BY DENYING the De Menezes inquest jury a verdict of unlawful killing, Sir Michael Wright, the coroner, was probably trying to do the police a favour. But the real loser from his clumsy manoeuvre is not the De Menezes family. It's the Met.

Short of holding up a giant Noel Edmonds-style V-sign in court and throwing paper darts at the bench, jury members could scarcely have done more to show their contemptuous disagreement with the police and their ally, Sir Michael.

We may allow that this was no "murder", as more excitable campaigners claim; we may accept that the officers who shot Jean Charles de Menezes honestly believed him a suicide bomber, and believed that killing him was the only way to save their own and other people's lives - though the jury, in fact, accepted none of these things.

But unlawful killing doesn't have to mean murder. There is such a thing as "gross negligence manslaughter", where a death is the direct result of unintentional but avoidable and serious failings. The misdirection of those unfortunate firearms officers about their target, the indefensible confusion of the nearly 35 minutes between De Menezes leaving home as "probably not" a suspect and being killed as a "definite" suicide bomber - that is where the real culpability lies, at the command level.

The Met argued that its failings were a combination of lots of different people's mistakes, and no one individual's errors went over the threshhold of gross negligence. That may or may not be so - but it is precisely the sort of issue that juries are there to consider.

Sir Michael is already being mentioned in the same breath as that legend of judicial Dulux, Lord Hutton; this strikes me as harsh. He is more like the judge in the Ponting secrets case who alienated another jury by too overt a display of support for the authorities.

If Sir Michael had allowed the jury a full range of choices, they might possibly have come back with a "real" open verdict. But the open verdict they reached now has the same moral force as a verdict of unlawful killing, and the De Menezes family have essentially what they wanted and deserved. For the police, by contrast, it could not have been worse.

Even a "proper" unlawful killing verdict would have brought the Met some sort of closure by forcing it to do what it has still not done, fully and sincerely confront the manifest enormities of the De Menezes case.

Instead the sore continues to bubble and fester; and we are still, incredibly, hearing the same wretched excuses from the likes of Ken Livingstone about "tremendous pressure" and "split-second decisions". As the jury ruled, the police mistakes were caused not simply by the pressure they were under but by foreseeable and systemic failings over not seconds, but more than half an hour. After this inconvenient triumph for the jury system, ministers may try to revive plans for secret, juryless inquests in "national security" cases. This must be resisted. And how bizarre it is that for Labour the main current policing "scandal" is not De Menezes at all but Boris Johnson's statements over Damian Green.

The Mayor faces disciplinary action for questioning an abuse of police power in a case apparently without a crime. But over the killing of an innocent - where the Met has already been convicted by an Old Bailey jury and effectively accused of lying by an inquest jury - not a single officer has been disciplined, or ever will be. They are the untouchables. Such is the looking-glass London we live in.

The bike beats the car again

I WATCHED Chris Hoy take one of his three Olympic golds in the velodrome at Beijing this year, and it didn't seem to matter that he had done so in a sport — cycling keirin — which I, and perhaps the vast majority of the British public, had never even heard of until five minutes previously. Now, in an experience familiar to any London cyclist, Hoy's bike has overtaken a car-driver stuck in traffic (Lewis Hamilton) to reach his destination first — in this case the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, rather than Sainsbury's. I know Hamilton was expected to win; but to qualify for the Sports Personality of the Year, you have to have a personality.

Let's hope TFL losses are real

IF the so-called "GLA family" were a real family, it would almost certainly be the subject of a horrified child obesity exposé. Today's news of "significant" TfL job losses — for non-frontline staff only — is therefore most welcome but needs to be examined carefully. The organisation has already promised savings of £2.4 billion — impressive, until you learn they're being spread over the next eight years. Let's hope most of the lost jobs actually will be jobs lost, rather than simply vacancies unfilled. It sounds heartless, I know: but in the crisis we face, a deep cull of paperclips resource marketing teams is the only way to save the jobs of train drivers and station staff and the services they provide.